We’re only a phone call away to rescue snakes from homes
before they are killed, and work with the Forest Department on such small
rescue missions. But often we hear about a handsome snake only a day after it
is killed. The most common incidences of human-snake interactions happen during
monsoon, and they are different than most because the incidences of the largest
of the snakes – the Indian Rock Python, Python molursus – of
central India venturing boldly near human settlements and agriculture fields in
search of prey increases.

Pythons have fascinated man since a long time, and Forsyth wrote
about them to be a “subject of so many wonderful tales” in central India. Forsyth mentions the
Indian Rock Python only once in his epic Highlands of Central
India as a narration of his encounter with this snake in the forests of central India. His description is rather vivid, as is his reaction, for pythons evoke a great fear and awe in those who see it (pp. 353–354):

“It was in these jungles that I first saw
the great rock python of India, which is the subject of so many wonderful tales.
I was following the track of a wounded deer, and, the day being very hot, had
mounted my horse, a chestnut Arab, from which I could shoot, carrying a rifle.
The horse almost trod upon him, lying on a narrow pathway, and started back with
a snort, as the great snake slowly twisted himself off the road, and down the
slope of the hill, along which it wound. A loud rustling, and here and there
the wave of a fold in the grass, told me that something was moving down the
bank, and I forced the horse after it, very unwillingly on his part, till with
a loud hiss, and a swish of his folds, the serpent gathered himself into a
great coil, just under the horse's nose. A very unpleasant sound, like the boiling
of a big kettle, came from the gathered pyramid of coils, and I lost no time in
leaning over and firing both barrels of the rifle into the mass, at the same
time drawing the horse back to the pathway, as I did not know the customer I
had to deal with. The snake made off down the hill, and my horse refused to
follow, so that, before I could dismount and get down on foot, all trace of him
was lost. I was taken by surprise, or should perhaps have made a better business
of it. My impression was that the creature was about twenty-five feet long, of
a leaden colour, and about as thick as a large man s thigh. I have seen one
killed in the same jungles, which measured sixteen feet in length. They are of
a very sluggish disposition, and do not molest man. The stories of their
swallowing spotted deer whole, antlers and all, I believe to be utter myths.”

On World Snake Day (July 16), we received a call about a
python that had come in contact of a grazing lot of cattle and goats under the
shadow of a rocky hillock striped of trees called Chandi. It had caught hold of
an adult goat by the neck, twisted her around a couple of times, but had let her
go when the shepherd hit it hard on its head. Since then, the shepherd later
informed us, the snake had been lying still. We arrived in the evening to a
little gathering of several bystanders, local taxis and bikers forming an arc
around the road, and first laid our eyes on a gorgeous eight foot long python
lying still by the roadside. A few yards from the gathering the cattle and the
goats grazed oblivious to the commotion.

The left-half of the python’s jaw was bleeding, and remained
half-open. The snake’s body however showed no wounds. With the help of the
Forest Department, we took it away for a checkup and some dressing of its
bleeding mouth. I asked the shepherd if the goat was alright, and he said yes;
except for a sprain in the neck, she was okay. I also wanted to ask why he
didn’t kill the snake, instead of just hitting it enough to let it go of its grasp,
but refrained.

We brought the snake to our centre in Kanha, and let it rest
here for a while. The most snake-friendly veterinarian was with us that day,
and we were able to examine the snake when the park authorities arrived. It had
six severe puncture wounds on its lower jaw, probably created by its own upper
teeth when he was hit hard on the head; and the upper jaw was a black-blue line
of broken teeth and damaged mouthparts that had punctured the lower. Clotted
blood had filled its mouth.

Once cleaned of its wound and examined for other injuries –
which fortunately were none – the snake was bathed with water a number of
times. And then, it began to move. Some said that the snake might be a female
about five years old. When she began
to crawl, she did so in a very straight line using her muscles as legs.

The deputy ranger told us of his encounters with these
giants in the forests of Kanha. Generally, it is said, when a python makes a
kill, all the animals unite against it and stamp upon it. Once, he said, he saw
a python bringing down a Barasingha, but the snake received a strong
resistance, and became masked in its own blood, but it did not let go of its
prey. It perhaps implied that a python is strong enough to withstand such
excruciating pain.

It was unanimously decided that the python would be released
that night itself, so she was taken deep inside the protected forests, away from
any human interactions, where she could find peace of mind that she earnestly required
for healing. That is all we could do. Snakes do not express pain, the
veterinarian expressed, and to keep her would have stressed her, and might have
killed her.

To watch this large python eight feet long and weighing
about the same slither smoothly on the moist earth as it vanished into the
darkness was a hopeful sight. It would have been in vain, and unnatural, for
this gentle wild beast to be arrested until she was fully healed. We saw her
raise her head to see where she was headed as she made her way through the
thickets. She would find shelter, and rest there for days until her wounds healed
and her teeth grew back, and she would never have to chase human pets again.

For five years she stayed near human settlements, feeding on
rodents, hares, and possibly small domestic animals. And in those five years
she had never encountered a human. On this fateful day when we were celebrating
World Snake Day, she encountered her worst enemy – man – by a mere accident.

The Holy Python, now ready for release.

But what made the shepherd not kill her when almost all the
snakes are inevitably killed made all the difference. It gave her a new life.
The reason for not killing her perhaps
lies in an ancient tradition. Pythons are considered an avatar of Goddess
Lakshmi, who brings good fortune, and who visits homes after the harvest is
stored in granary and rests there guarding the grains from rodents and bad
omen. This simple belief has saved this snake from its doom, and perhaps has
saved many in the past. Old tales tell of pythons seeking shelter in granaries
for many years, when people were more tolerant of them.

Last year we rescued a feisty python measuring five feet and
weighing about the same, which was found by women working in fields. A few
years before the Forest Department had to request women to stop worshiping a
female python and her neonates who had taken shelter on a hill not so far from
Chandi so that they could rescue the snake family.

These tales are of a small note, but the traditional culture
is probably the only thing that has kept central India’s largest snakes alive
outside of protected areas. But their fate hangs by a thread.

Kaa’s words to Baloo and Bagheera, “Psshaw! The branches
are not what they were when I was young. Rotten twigs and dry boughs are they all”
(– Kaa's Hunting, The Jungle Book)
might be coming true after all.

Woodcutting, bringing new land under cultivation, and
expanding of grazing lands is closing the gap between these gentle giants and
the potentially easier-to-catch domestic animals. And that would mean conflict.
It is only this traditional thread that is keeping local communities tolerant
of pythons in their backyard, and it is the only thread ecologists have to pull
on to, to make it stronger if we are to protect this enigmatic species before
conflict increases.

Phapha sat on the dashboard of the car, clueless of where he
was going. He sat in a position that meant he was exhausted, scared, and unsure
of what had happened and would happen. When the car came to a halt, he made no
move. He was picked up by two hands cupping his wings, and was placed carefully
on the table. He wore the fully-adorned plumage of myriad shades of blues, with
subtle hues of crimson sprinkled on the brown-streaked neck – the shades and
hues typical of the elegant Neelkanth,
the Indian Roller, Coracias benghalensis. The only noticeable characters were a shorter-than-usual tail, and
yellow gape flanges typical of a fledgling – a teenager of the birdlife – whose
curiosity is greater than fear, and who’s more eager to spread wings than stay
nestled.

He sat in the same manner when he arrived – the pose he
retained until he found a suitable place to perch upon – and looked at us
intently as we observed him for any injury. He appeared healthy but incapable
of flight: several of his primaries were missing, and a black mass, probably
the result of burning, seemed to have damaged further down to the sheath that
covers a new feather. As I made a box, in which he spent most of his nights, he
sat and made my bag his perch – where he sat for more than half of his stay.
The box was completely open from a side and a branch, inserted near the
lower-bottom frame of the box – served as a comfortable perch. After a few
drops of glucose, he sat inside for the rest of the day and into the night.

The summer mornings are pleasant until the sun rises four
fingers high. Phapha stirred before I did on his first morning, and hopped and
sat on my bag again. I decided to venture out into the verandah, wondering what
could possibly be the best food for this little bird. Phapha had not eaten in
more than a day, and I was getting worried.

The Indian Roller is a common bird of the Indian countryside
– more at home in the vast expanses of scrub and grassland habitats than dense
forests – where they perch on the edge of plantations or commonly on electric
wires and scan the ground for insects. The name, Indian Roller, comes from its
habit of rolling midair during courtship display. Their dance – which begins
around March and is a common sight in the central Indian skies – is a spectacle
worth watching. The males fly up high in the sky, and roll back down as if on a
swing, like a trapeze artist, calling out to the spectators – usually a female
perched somewhere in his vision – in a rather shrill, bark-like, call.

Their breeding season begins with such dances, and mating
occurs shortly afterwards as days become hotter. I consider this time unusual
for breeding, especially for birds that rely so much on open spaces for food,
but the rollers seem to have adapted to this season by nesting inside tree
cavities. How they tirelessly feed their chicks in this hot season I cannot
fathom, and I had a glimpse of it when Phapha came to us.

Phapha was born on an ancient Banyan tree in a quaint little
village in central India. His parents had made home in a hollow in one of the
many of the tree’s arms. Phapha might have had the best memories of the place –
a tree as wide as a playground for a small bird to play on, surrounded by
houses and agricultural fields which must have served as an endless source of food.
I wondered what his first glimpse outside the hollow beheld – did he see the
tree as the playground, and houses where food hid? He must have jumped off his
perch, and stumbled upon the thinner branches of the tree when he thought his
time to explore had come. Sometime during his solo adventures he must have
fallen into the hands of children playing around; a moment that changed his
life completely.

A kid held the end of a rope that was tied to Phapha’s legs,
and the children were sitting and playing with this young bird when my friends
intervened, but the only intervention sought from the elders around was that
the children are children, let them play and then they will leave him,
they said. Phapha’s rescue was bought for a sum of five rupees, and he was
taken from them, untied, and kept on the dashboard of the car. I was quite
unaware of what befell this young bird until I heard the complete story. Why
was the bird not put up back up the tree, where his parents would have been
waiting? What should have been told to the kids, who had no clue that tying the
bird is harmful for it? But Phapha was here, over a hundred kilometers from his
home, clueless of where he was, and he was hungry.

Studies by Sivakumaran
and Thiyagesan (2003) on the ecology of the Indian Roller have shown their
preference towards beetles (Coleoptera), grasshoppers (Orthoptera), and then
members of Hymenoptera, and Lepidoptera; they are also known to eat reptiles
such as lizards and small snakes. When I walked among the shriveled grasses on
Phapha’s first morning, I pondered over what he could possibly eat – and his
potential food hopped right off my path and sat on a grass blade – a grasshopper.
Catching grasshoppers is not an easy task. Although you see them everywhere,
getting close to them and having to use your fingers to grab them requires a
lot of patience, and skill. Both of which I lacked severely. I caught eight of
them of the thirty or so I tried, and brought them back to where Phapha sat on
his favourite perch.

To my delight, he ate them all in no time – but that meant
that I had to catch more. And to catch more I had to persuade more people to
help me catch more grasshoppers with me. We devised a small bamboo-framed
triangular net called phapha net, to
catch grasshoppers. In that day we fed Phapha with eighty grasshoppers of
varying sizes – from less than an inch to over two in length. Catching
grasshoppers, called phapha in
Baigani (a dialect spoken by Baiga tribes of central India), became a morning
and evening exercise, and thus he came to be named Phapha himself, partly also
because he hopped like one wherever he went.

On the morning of the next day, I saw a small pellet lying
outside his box, comprising all the indigestible parts of the grasshoppers he
gobbled up whole – and in it were remains of legs, wings, and assorted
unintelligible parts. I found it difficult to select beetles to feed him, since
some are unpalatable even though they appear edible, and this made me think
about Sivakumaran and Thiyagesan’s paper which shows beetle parts as a major
component of a roller’s pellet. Although there is no doubt that beetles are a
part of their diet, I think they do not contribute significantly to their diet,
one of the reason being that beetles are rather small, and difficult to spot
when the birds perch up high. Or, that beetle parts are mostly hard and indigestible,
and hence appear more commonly in pellets than other insects.

I kept a track of how many grasshoppers Phapha ate, and at
times, when we could manage to catch as much as a hundred, he ate as many in a
day. Slowly, however, we grew tired of catching grasshoppers in the day, and I
substituted his diet with raw chicken. This showed some interesting facets of
Phapha.

By the end of a week, Phapha had become accustomed to be
eating from my hand – and would hop closer to me whenever I sat on the bed, making
a shrill kree-kree sound when he was
hungry and I was around. On a fine Sunday morning as I sat to read Jeff
Corwin’s 100 heartbeats: the race to save
Earth’s most endangered species, Phapha who was sitting on his favourite
perch hopped and landed on my shoulder, and made it to my head, and sat there
watching out the window. His gaze fell on everything that flew past his
eyesight. I was reading about the Heath Hen that became extinct in the
Americas, and of the success of bringing Bald Eagles a step back from the
valley of extinction. Later that day, I read these words (quoting Jeff Corwin):
“…we keep it alive because we should. We do it because we take responsibility
for this bird’s plight. We do it because we are
responsible for its plight”. (pp 32).

My thoughts went back to Phapha and at countless other
animals caught from the wild, and tied, and toyed with. I felt a deep sense of regret when I looked
back at Phapha; his life that seemed to have faded from his eyesight without
his knowledge. That he, although untied and uncaged, was living within four
walls of a human habitat separated by a glass that kept him from venturing out.
Rescuing an animal is easier said than done, but it is easier – far more easier
– than rehabilitating it.

I faced an ethical conundrum. Rescuing an animal hurt by
humans is ethical, but if the animal is injured by a natural cause, I think it
is unjustifiable. Had Phapha been a victim of a mongoose or a snake attack,
rescuing him would have meant hurting the mongoose or the snake that had every
right to do what they’re evolved to do. However, rescuing Phapha from humans
with intentions to use it for mere entertainment seemed the most ethical thing
to do, as ethical as rescuing a leopard that fell in the well. My heart went
out to the elders who said that the kids are just playing with it – would they be so casual if they found a
tiger playing with theirs – I wondered, but shrugged at that thought, for it is
too inhuman, too sensitive, too cruel to think of. What of Phapha then, I ask.

Phapha’s plight is but a symbol of what millions of birds go
through when they are cramped in cages, even in bottles, to be sold as
displays, toys, or used for superstitious rituals. But Phapha made me think of
the ethics of rescues – his rescue is justified because he was in danger from
humans, but had he been put up back on the tree, his parents would have
accepted him, and fed him – but he would have never been away from harm, since
the kids knew where he came from. His rescue was also highly doubtful because
we were unsure of whether he would survive such a shock. During his initial
days, I kept observing his primaries – he had lost four of them from the root –
to see signs of their growth, but all I saw was a black smoldered spot that
appeared as though his feather would never grow back. He started losing several
of his other primaries and tail feathers, but he always ate plenty.

He did not take liking to chicken at first – he was
accustomed to the jumping, crunchy grasshoppers than the slimy, dead, wet
chicken pieces, but he slowly developed a taste for it. Whenever he was done
eating, he would vigorously shake his head if I offered more. Sometimes when I
came back with a few morsels, he would shake his head when he saw me entering
the room – signaling me that I’m full,
or saying no, not chicken again!

To reduce his dependency on us, we decided to open an empty,
large room, and rested his box near the window. He now had a large space to
explore, safer than he would have been without wings in the open. I stopped
offering him food from hand, and instead threw it around him for him to catch. And
he gobbled phaphas, and ate chicken,
and puked pellets and shat all over the room. I kept a track of his lost
primaries every two-to-three days, but they looked like lifeless little holes. It
was quite discouraging really, that after more than a week Phapha was as helpless
as he was when rescued. Many of the people remained discouraged, and questioned
the ethics of sacrificing grasshoppers for one bird’s survival; that he would
never fly again, and the best for him was to release him and let the nature
take its course. I relented partly, because a bird in a cage is as good as a
bird dead – Phapha’s fate was sealed when he was captured first. I kept him and
his box outside my window under a banana tree, and he quickly came out and sat
on top of the box. I sat a few yards away. Phapha made no move, but then he
slowly started hopping about in the undergrowth – but he could never reach to
any branch of a tree around. Deciding that he was not ready for the outside
world yet, he was back in his room, eating phaphas
and chicken.

By this time Phapha had eaten more than 500 of grasshoppers,
some put the figure between 800 and a thousand.

[If this number is related to the number of grasshoppers eaten by rollers in agricultural fields, they seem to be very efficient at
removing grasshoppers from fields, and are as much a farmer’s friend as an
earthworm. In my expeditions of keeping a stock of grasshoppers, I also came to
realise that grasshopper poop – which appears like tiny pellets pointed at two
ends – can be a great source of fertilizer which can be derived by feeding
grasshoppers with weeds in agricultural fields (but that’s another topic).]

But by then people were fed up with me more than with
Phapha, since he demanded a lot of them, and the cruel nautappa, the season of extreme heat and humidity in central India,
was at its peak, making hunting for grasshoppers an exhausting task. After a
few more days, albeit being pessimistic, I decided to release him again. And in
deciding his fate I somehow declared myself god. Who am I to decide this for him
– not once but twice – what if he required more time to recover?

On the morning of June 4, fourteen days after Phapha first
came to us, I happened to check his primaries after several days – and I saw
all the stubs sprouting little folded, wrinkled, deep-blue feathers – like
first leaves of spring. I was overjoyed. What prompted me to check I know not.
Over the next few days, I observed he was able to maneuver sophisticatedly
while reaching out to catch grasshoppers on the floor; he was able to see them
from over five-to-six feet away, chase after them if they hopped off, and would
perch gracefully on the arm of the bed. His chuckling voice (sounds as chhuckk-chhuckk) – typical of the adults
– and his practice of bill-up laughter displays became frequent.

I started feeding him more of chicken than grasshoppers
because it became physically nearly impossible to find so many for him – and I wonder
how parent rollers manage to feed their chicks in this oppressive heat –, and
by June 11, he flew well around the room, but he wasn’t able to sustain his
flight for long, neither could he fly up the table if he sat on the floor
eating.

My early days with Phapha were divided into the time I had
to feed him, which I calculated at every two hours from 7 or 8 AM to 6 PM, with
a 3 hour long break during the hot afternoons. He had become quite accustomed
to this timing, and when he started flying a little, I made his feeding time
irregular. I would infrequently enter the room, and whenever I did I would let
grasshoppers all around for him to find and eat, and forced him to keep
changing his positions in the room for a little exercise.

We received our first monsoon rains on June 14. It poured
sweetly all afternoon, and calmed the weather by several degrees. Winged
termites and ants, velvet mites, and tiger beetles left their earthly homes to
venture out in the open. Grasses sprouted, and the life of monsoon spun into
action.

Phapha, by then, was excellent at flying short distances. On
June 17, he flew all around the room without crashing into anything or taking a
pause, but most elegant was the way he landed – by carefully flapping his wings
with his eyes set on the perch, stretching his feet, and grabbing onto the arm
of the bed.

Phapha seemed to be ready for the wild, for he often sat
near the window more than ever, and on June 20, exactly after a month from he was
rescued, Phapha’s box was kept atop an old Palash tree. This spot was in a
secondary forest, away from any village. Several other trees stood around, and
green grass grew at their feet, rich with bouncing grasshoppers. The morning we
decided to release him was cold and it was drizzling. After placing the box on
the tree, Phapha immediately came out and sat on the platform created by one of
the box’s flaps. And he sat there for an entire five minutes, chuckling and
looking around at other birds flying by. We sat a few yards from him. And as
the sun shone behind him, and into my eyes, Phapha took his first long flight, away from those who tied him, away from those who released him, and
disappeared behind a vast treeline overshadowed by monsoon clouds. And he never
looked back.